Small Potatoes, Time, and Inbound Marketing

When you make mistakes, it is best to learn the lessons they teach you. Sometimes the lessons are about something else entirely – like time management and inbound marketing.

Counting Potatoes

It all started when I was making my supper. I was a bit hungry and grabbed some baby potatoes to roast. I would usually eat one large potato or two medium ones. Baby potatoes are much smaller. Obviously, one large potato is the equivalent of about 50 baby potatoes.

Having made this mistake before, and being considerate of my figure, I reduced the count to around twenty.

Still too many.

There are two related business lessons here.

Estimating Portions and Proportions

People are notoriously bad at estimating work. This assessment can be the effort it takes to implement a marketing campaign or the time required to develop and debug software.

We are better at comparisons.

This is the same as that. This medium potato is half the size of that large one. The bigger the difference, the less precise we get. That is how we end up cooking 20 small potatoes to replace the large one.

You need many benchmarks to base your efforts off of if you want to estimate better. The estimates are then valid comparisons based on simpler multiples.

Small Potatoes Add Up

As an entrepreneur and business owner, you typically have a lot of roles and responsibilities. Days are made up of many little things that don’t seem like much. Those small things add up. Soon you don’t have enough time to tackle the big things well – like working on the business and marketing.

The other way to see this is that small changes and improvements add up over time to have a large impact. That is how inbound marketing behaves. Over time and with consistency, your work starts to attract more visitors, and the right ones convert to leads.

Most businesses overestimate how much they can do in a short timeframe and underestimate how much they can accomplish over a longer period.

Share this post with your network:

Doug Wagner is an entrepreneur, President and Co-founder of Sunwapta Solutions. Sunwapta's mission is to help businesses transform from surviving to thriving, sustainable growth. From strategy to implementation, this means marketing, sales, managing your brand and delivering consistent value. Get more clients and keep them.